Interstitial
by Pandorama
Summary: Hotch and Prentiss and what exists in the cracks of canon. Episodic drabbles from her entrance on.
1. Season Two

**A/N:** Um. Hi. This is a new fandom for me. And a new style. It's an exercise of sorts. Trying to stretch my writing muscles. Or something.

The gist (and hopefully, you're reading this and not skipping to the story, because this is probably important information) is that, for each episode beginning with the first appearance of Emily Prentiss, I've written a drabble (a drabble, for the record, is not just a short piece, it's 100 words. Exactly. So stop calling things drabbles if they're not. You're insulting Monty Python). That's the first part of the exercise. The other part is that I'm sticking with canon, or at least, on-screen canon, while trying to craft a continuous, unseen story that doesn't conflict with said canon while simultaneously changing the impact of some of what we've seen. If that makes any sense. If it doesn't, oops. But I thought I'd attempt to explain what's going to happen here.

I'll be posting each season as a chapter, with each episode as a drabble therein. I have every intention of writing through the end of season ten, though I haven't actually decided how to end this whole mess just yet. Chapter titles will correspond to season numbers.

Season Two

"Hello, I love you, let me jump in your game."

(The Doors)

**2.09**

Aaron Hotchner is an exceptional profiler.

He is not an exceptional actor.

He knows his performance when Emily Prentiss walks into his office is on par with his run in _Penzance_.

He hopes she's a lousy profiler. That she can't tell he knows exactly who she is and exactly where she went to school the minute she walks in. But she's dead on about the I-80 killer, and when she stands close to him and looks him in the eye, he knows she's aware of the way she throws him.

And that she holds a strange, terrifying power over him.

**2.10**

"New girl's a decent chess player." Gideon ambles into his office, contemplative as ever, stopping in front of the window. He gently nudges a spoke on the bicycle wheel suspended from the wall, never making eye contact. "Better than the kid."

"How was she as a profiler?"

"Like I said." Gideon peers at his fingertips, studying whatever's rubbed off from the bike. It's unnerving, how he's able to deduce a fragment of Hotch's life from that smudge. "A decent chess player."

Knowing she's earned praise from Jason Gideon in less than forty-eight hours only makes Prentiss more of an enigma.

**2.11**

"Prentiss, hang back, please."

The team scatters, and he plows ahead, lest she have the chance to tell him to go fuck himself. Not that he'd blame her.

"The Congresswoman is going to want my blood after this, but we still need her help. If you would - "

"Keep her from unhinging her jaw and swallowing you whole?"

"I was going to say 'mediate,' but yes, if you wouldn't mind."

"I believe I made clear this morning that I'm here to do the job."

"You did."

"Then don't insult me by asking me if I 'wouldn't mind' doing it."

**2.12**

He has a grudging admiration for the way Prentiss stands by Morgan. She's been there a handful of weeks, barely been in the field with him, but there's not even a moment's hesitation from her.

It's possible she's hiding her misgivings, but Hotch doubts she is. She trusts her gut more than she wants to be liked, and if she saw even a hint of Morgan's guilt, she'd have said something.

It makes him wonder, though - does faith in Morgan stem from faith in Hotch's own judgment?

He's not sure he's earned her faith, but he does want it.

**2.13**

In the desert sun, her hair is four colors at once, purple and red, black and brown, and he doesn't know why it fascinates him, but it does.

He rationalizes that it's because he's trained to notice. The moment he learns a person's name, he files away their height, weight, eye color, and hair color.

So maybe that's it. It's about risk, about the fact that if something were to happen, and he had to give those details, he'd come up short.

In the fluorescence of the jet's interior, sunset spilling through the windows, Hotch settles on a word.

_Chocolate._

**2.14**

He's not sure what it is about watching Haley and Prentiss laughing at Morgan's antics like they're old friends, but it makes his skin crawl. He's not much for dancing, but he feels an intense need to get away from her, get Haley away from her, and he doesn't understand it.

He doesn't understand why he didn't tell Haley about the new agent nor about their brief shared history, why he goes out of his way to avoid being alone with her, why he avoids eye contact with her, or why he instinctively distances himself.

He doesn't want to understand.

**2.15**

When he asks for a list of his flaws, she has to rack her brain. Not because he's flawless - hardly - but because she has to come up with one that isn't too personal.

_You act like you've never met me whenever we're alone. _

_You never acknowledge my contributions unless it's to correct them. _

_You always stand close to me but never look at me. _

_You still owe me for a game of blackjack at the French Embassy twelve years ago._

In the end, she generalizes, but she's fairly sure he understands.

He doesn't trust her, and it hurts.

**2.16**

He's pleased that she's bonding with Morgan, but he can't help the twinge of envy. He knows he's been a complete jackass where she's concerned, but he can't figure out how to shift their dynamic at this point.

It's because of that last night before she left for Yale (not Brown), and he'd been there when her mother told her, in essence, that if Emily turned down an invitation from the French Ambassador's nephew, it would spell the end of free trade.

She'd looked stunning in red, and now he doesn't know how to tell her he likes Vonnegut, too.

**2.17**

He purposely sits beside Morgan on the plane, anticipating that she'll sit across from them, now that she's found a friend. He stays silent until Morgan gets up to check on Reid, and Hotch is glad, both because Reid's been off lately and because it gives him his opening.

"You did well with the girl."

Her head snaps up and she sees the surprise in her expression, and the flash of pride. "Thank you, Sir."

"You don't have to call me Sir, Prentiss. 'Hotch' is fine."

There's a twitch of a smile on her face.

They've entered a new condition.

**2.18**

"Could I talk to you for a minute?"

"Have a seat."

She obeys, tentatively.

"What is it?" He cringes. Too harsh. He softens. "Nothing you say here leaves this room."

She nods. "I know Reid's having a hard time, justifiably. You know him better than I do. If there's something I should be doing - "

"You can't cover for him again."

Her eyes widen. "I - "

"I understand why you did, and once is fine. But if it happens again, you need to tell me."

"I will."

"Good. And Prentiss?"

"Sir?"

"Thank you for looking out for him."

**2.19**

It's a side of him she wasn't sure existed.

She's shocked when he breaks protocol at the hospital, reassures a dying woman that her child and husband are safe. Sends her out of the room but stays, himself, so the woman is not alone at the end. Tells her to sit out the profile, reassures her it's not as punishment, that he doesn't fault her.

"Fire is different," he says. "We all struggle."

But it's his reaction to being unable to save Abby, to his son's loss, which overwhelms her.

He is exquisitely, beautifully human.

She doesn't realize she's slipping.

**2.20**

"How many languages do you actually know, Prentiss? Besides Spanish, Arabic, and Russian."

"Well, I - "

"Don't tell me you're 'passable,' because I know better."

She shrugs. She's a perfectionist. "Doesn't it say in my file?"

"It says a lot in your file."

Huh. She has a feeling there's subtext there. "Well, I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."

"I see."

"Thank you, by the way. For today. If I'd known she was coming - "

"Don't worry about it. Family's important. Besides…who says it was a favor to you?"

"Still scared of the Ambassador?"

"Terrified."

**2.21**

He mimics the posture of sleep, but his mind doesn't follow suit. He overhears her talking to Morgan, wondering aloud the precise concern that's tormenting him.

They think like monsters because they have to, because it's how they catch them. But he's always been aware that a paper-thin line separates the hunters and hunted. After Elle, it's only become more acute.

He watches them, now, for signs that the line has blurred. Sometimes he worries that seeing that line means he's too close to it.

But she sees it, too. And he thinks maybe that's a point in his favor.

**2.22**

She's been trying to figure it out since she started at the BAU. And as they stand on opposite sides of the girl, leaning over her like new parents over a bassinet, she realizes. It's his eyes.

He's intimidating, imposing, the very model of a modern G-man. A few hours ago, she'd seen him intimidate a man simply by standing there.

Logic dictates that he should not put victims at ease, but he defies logic. He can transform in an instant from hardened agent to steadfast protector.

They see in his eyes the man he is, and so does she.

**2.23**

Until the moment she's ordered to betray him, she doesn't realize the extent to which she cares for Aaron Hotchner. She'd known she respects him, admires him. Trusts him more than anyone she's ever worked with. Begun to like him, even.

She's always been willing to take a bullet for one of her team. Just as she knows he would.

It only comes crashing into her conscious as Strauss issues her ultimatum that she would do it out of something more than principle.

She realizes in that moment that she's over the precipice, and the fall may well kill her.


	2. Season Three

Season Three

"And I wonder/If everything could ever feel this real forever/If anything could ever be this good again."

(Foo Fighters)

**3.01**

He's not stupid. He knows, in hindsight, that Prentiss didn't maneuver her way into the unit, but his suspicions regarding Strauss' hand in her assignment never dissipated. If anything, they've grown, along with his resentment, because he's come to realize just how good Prentiss is, and he hates that she's being used for political gain.

The self-doubt in her eyes tells him Strauss has made her move.

He's not worried about what she'll do. Not only does he recognize her integrity, but he recognizes what a mistake Strauss is making in trying to control a woman who won't be caged.

**3.02**

There's a moment as he's walking into her apartment, a pang of primal urge that tears through him like a bullet. Something untethered by Haley's veiled ultimatum that sets loose a flood of repressed desire, and he can barely breathe for how desperately he wants to back her into a wall and give in to baser instinct.

And then, as quickly as it rose, it settles, and he is in control once more.

Later, as blood trickles down her forehead and Strauss signals her retreat, he wonders if this will be the thing that undoes him.

Something's going to give.

**3.03**

Hearing him tell Morgan that Haley's left sends a surge of emotions through her, splintered like light hitting a prism: anticipation, sadness, fear, resentment.

She writes it off as empathy.

But she thinks she understands, at least, why he's put some distance between them again. He's in unfamiliar territory, unsteady without Gideon, and she knows him the least. She's too much of a variable when the rest of his life is uncertain.

A seat away, Hotch knows: the distance is self-preservation. His rug is already out from beneath him, and he's certain she has the power to make him fall.

**3.04**

She doesn't know if she could be a mother. Doesn't know if the instinct is in there, somewhere.

And because Hotch is a father and profiler at once, she tests the waters. Mentions the prospect of taking Carrie.

Somehow, she thinks his reaction hurts more than if he'd simply told her she'd make a lousy mother. It's a compounded insult, rejection of her prospects as a parent coupled with questions of capability.

When she tells him she needs to know she can be human, she knows she's hitting back. Hard.

They leave each other in pieces for Jack and JJ.

**3.05**

Hotch goes from the mall to his son, and from there, the office. He won't be sleeping tonight.

He's shocked by what he finds in the bullpen. Prentiss looks every bit as perturbed as he feels. She glances up as he walks in, and he feels suddenly like she's been expecting him.

Like she's here, in part, so he won't be alone.

He stops short of her desk, weighing the risk. But he's only human.

"Do you drink Scotch?"

Shock flashes in her eyes, but she recovers fast. "Tonight I'd drink toilet wine."

"Johnny Walker Blue will have to suffice."

**3.06**

He forgot to warn Rossi. To the man's credit, he just leans over like he's looking at a crime scene photo and raises his eyebrows.

"New tradition?"

"Only when we go to Texas." He'll admit - he's always been impressed by the straight faces the two of them maintain throughout.

"Gideon's doing."

"Who else?"

After the third hummed refrain, Dave gamely taps his pen in time and murmurs along.

"_Deep in the heart of Texas…"_

Hotch feels a surge of envy when he sees delight flash in Emily's eyes.

He wonders how long it'll take Dave to figure him out.

**3.07**

If asking her to call him "Hotch" was their formal détente, their night spent drinking in the dark was their rapprochement. Neither knows how or why things have changed, but there's no question that they have. They're fluid in the field, able to anticipate one another and move precisely, two people who have never been much for partnership realizing the value of complementarity.

They don't acknowledge this development, nor the boundary between them that's hazy at best. Neither voices the realization that if they work this well together in the field, anything they had in private would be profoundly spectacular.

**3.08**

"This," she murmurs, "is not what I signed up for when I joined."

He's first on the jet, and she's sitting beside him. Deliberately.

"My fondness for chili has certainly taken a hit."

"You like chili?"

"Before this, I did."

She grins. "Ever been to Ben's Chili Bowl?"

He cocks an eyebrow. "I'm offended you'd even ask."

"I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back."

"Give it time."

Two weeks later, he finds a Tupperware container on his desk bearing a Post-It in her handwriting:

"_It's not Ben's, but let me know what you think. - Prentiss"_

**3.09**

The fire in his eyes when he tells them he doesn't care about protocol spreads, burning her up. The intensity, how fiercely he cares for them all, hits her in the split second their eyes meet.

It's overwhelmed almost immediately by concern for Garcia, but it simmers, agitates, and then things come to a head it's all over. The BAU empties, one by one, until it's just them.

"Drink?" His voice echoes.

She nods, ascends to his office and accepts a proffered tumbler. He sits close, eschewing the barrier of his desk.

They both feel it.

They're being burned alive.

**3.10**

"Are we all capable of becoming like that?"

Her voice brings him out of his morose daze. He remembers, years ago, watching her argue with the French Ambassador over something to do with Sartre, switching between English and French and what he thought sounded like German. She'd thrown up her hands and snatched a first edition from a display case to prove her point, quoting word for word before thrusting it back and demanding a glass of wine from a passing waiter.

She's always had a way of making existentialism enthralling.

Then again, he thinks, maybe it's just her essence.

**3.11**

The resignation in his eyes when he says he's been served takes her breath away, sends a searing ache through her body.

She has to force herself not to follow him. She knows if she does that it will spiral - he's raw, abandoned, and she just wants to take it away, and there's enough mutual care and attraction that he's going to take what he needs from her and she's going to give it willingly. And they're both going to wake up ashamed.

She's seen that regret before, and she thinks seeing him regret her would undo her completely.

**3.12**

"You wouldn't, you know." She lingers a moment in the doorway before moving forward through the dark to lay the file on his desk.

"I wouldn't what?"

"Do what he did. You've been asking yourself, if that had been your son, would you have done it."

"How did you - "

"I'm a profiler." She smirks, hip resting against his desk. "Even if he begged you to do it, you'd never put that on Jack. You wouldn't let the evil we see bleed into his world."

He looks at her, dumbstruck.

Her eyes find his. "Have a good night, Hotch."

**3.13**

It begins with a dream. They're chasing an amorphous figure through back alleys slick with rain, darkness all around them, the sound of footfalls and hard breaths overwhelming his senses. A gunshot echoes, and he dives for her, like he's trying to shield her. When they hit the ground, he feels softness. Skin on skin. Her hands are on his face and her eyes are wide, waiting for him.

When he looks across the conference table at her the next morning, shockwaves go through him.

He can remember her ragged breaths.

He stops partnering himself with her.

He's losing control.

**3.14**

He's heard more than a few women - Haley and her sister among them - lament that they will never understand men. He never responds, but he thinks about it sometimes - about saying he's one of them, and he doesn't understand men, either.

He's turning into some kind of werewolf, except more idiot than wolf. All day, he mourns the loss of his marriage, ruminates on his failings. At night, he has lurid dreams about a subordinate who is nothing like his wife, wakes overwhelmed with need.

The lone overlap is knowing that he doesn't deserve either of them.

**3.15**

She doesn't think flipping properties is for her. She needs something she can see, something that feels like righting just a little of the world's evil.

Something warm and fuzzy.

She's pouring coffee on Monday morning when he asks her about the scratches.

She looks down. "Oh. I…got a cat. Sergio."

"Sergio?"

"After Sergio Vieira - "

"- de Mello."

She shrugs. "I thought…he was the polar opposite of the people we deal with."

Hotch doesn't tell her it was the same reason he'd considered naming his son that. Instead, he reaches out, barely grazing her shoulder. "I like it."

**3.16**

He knows she wasn't riding a desk in the Midwest before she came to the BAU - the impassivity she shows in the field, that it's the ambiguous things that get to her and not the horrific, it's not about compartmentalization. She's seen too much already. She's not jaded, but she's impervious far beyond her years.

The way she reacts when Reid puts himself on the line is proof, because that sort of visceral terror only comes from a realized fear. Hotch knows from experience.

It dawns on him that she might actually be the one person who'd understand him.

**3.17**

Miami is screwing with all of them. Morgan is toeing the line between flirty and cartoonish and it's wearing Rossi's patience thin, Reid is even more clueless than usual, JJ's acting jumpy, and Garcia's speaking Italian. And she's not even in Florida.

For his part, Hotch seems to be avoiding Emily like the plague, shooting her strange looks when they do end up in the same room. She suspects it has something to do with the effects of humidity turning her into Diana Ross.

She wonders what this heat would do to all of them, given a few more days.

**3.18**

After JJ turns down her invitation, she stops by Hotch's office. She knows the answer, but she asks anyway.

"Morgan, Reid, and I are going to grab dinner if you want to join us."

He barely looks up. "Thanks, but I need to finish here."

"Hotch…" She trails off, seeing the legal papers. "Let me know if you change your mind."

His stony expression stays with her through dinner, and she makes an impulsive decision. When she taps on his office door, holding the carryout container, he looks stunned.

Sadness engulfs her then, because he's surprised that anyone would care.

**3.19**

"That sock thing must be a hell of a party trick."

He stops short of her desk. "I was a real hit at college parties."

"You're joking." Her chair spins toward him.

"It was a quick five bucks. Although…it wasn't socks."

Her expression as she registers the meaning is one of unrestrained glee. "You didn't."

"I plead the fifth." He's almost smiling, and there's a boyish glint in his eye she's never seen before.

It's intoxicating.

"Good thing there's that rule against profiling team members."

He walks away before she sees his face flush, because he's thinking about navy blue.

**3.20**

Everything is ablaze. Nerves and muscles igniting, blood rushing.

"_I need a drink."_

"_Minibar?"_

He can't breathe. His lungs burn.

"_I'm not sleeping with her."_

"_Okay. I'm not sleeping with Cooper. What's your point?"_

Her heart races. It's surreal.

"_This case…everything…I don't…"_

"_Tell me what you want from me, Hotch."_

He's breaking apart in a blinding moment.

"_It's complicated."_

"_It doesn't have to be."_

Emotions flood to the surface, ones she hasn't felt in so long.

"_Would you…my name…"_

"_Aaron."_

Death comes for them head on the next day, and finds two people more alive than they've been in awhile.


	3. Season Four

Season Four

"No one else knows/So take my hand/I'll carry you, you can carry me."

(Mat Kearney)

**4.01**

The explosion sends shrapnel tearing through the status quo. The confined exception in which their one night exists is ripped open, bleeding into reality.

The feeling of her fingers grazing his skin as she examines his cuts almost breaks him. It's been so long since anyone touched him like that.

She feels his breath on her wrist and for a moment, they stand on the precipice of friends and lovers.

Need overwhelms logic, and he moves his mouth to her pulse, pushing them over. There's no undressing, no lust, but it's unmistakable. They've crossed a line and there's no retreating.

**4.02**

She sits in the dark, deciding. She's gone back and forth a dozen times already and her left thumb is bleeding from nervous biting. The thing is, they don't have the sort of relationship where they check up on one another. They've slept together a few times, but there hasn't been much talking. Immediately after New York she'd been gentle with him, let things border on platonic comfort at first, but it had still been about physical intimacy. Not emotional.

She takes one last look at his building and makes a choice.

Once in awhile, she lets cowardice win out.

**4.03**

He watches as she lets a paramedic treat her cuts, insists she feels fine. He feels Dave's hand grip his shoulder. "This goes down as one of the wins."

"Yeah." He doesn't take his eyes off her.

"I know you're not the touchy-feely type, but it wouldn't be totally out of line to give her a hug and tell her you're glad she's not dead."

Hotch stays silent, because he'd rather seem cold than admit he's been blindsided by the depths of what he feels for her.

In her foyer that night, he does hold her, and it feels right.

**4.04**

She leans against the doorjamb, the low light of early morning casting a hazy luminescence over her. "No one's perfect at this. Not even you, Hotch."

"I know." He barely looks up from his paperwork.

"Then stop beating yourself up. We saved two lives."

"I know."

"Good."

"Anything else?"

She moves close enough to his desk that the solitary lamp illuminates her face, eyes soft. Not judging him. Only understanding. "Get your stuff, Hotch." Her voice is soft, and he meets her expression and finds himself unwilling to argue.

He's starting to feel like casual is fading into the distance.

**4.05**

"That was a hell of a shot you made." She's backlit by the bathroom, standing on the threshold of his bedroom in the dress shirt she'd taken off him not an hour ago. "Secret sniper training?"

He just looks at her. A little spellbound.

"Hotch?"

"Lucky shot, I guess."

"Uh-huh." She sits beside him, a little tentative.

"Stay tonight." It comes out rushed, awkward.

"Are you sure?"

His mouth is dry. "We're off tomorrow. I thought…it's late. You're probably tired." God, he sounds pathetic.

But she smiles, almost shyly. Says she will. Buttons come undone.

This can't possibly be real.

**4.06**

He's used to being woken at all hours, though rarely by knocking. And almost never by one of his agents, plastered and unkempt and giggling uncontrollably (the almost being Rossi, and only twice).

Emily Prentiss, he concedes, is a better looking drunk than Dave.

He hauls her inside, checking the hallway before turning to find her grinning lasciviously and kicking off her shoes.

"Do bad things to me, Agent Hotchner."

He's torn between shock and the instinct to comply, but the gentleman in him wins out, and it's barely ten minutes before she's asleep.

Beside her, he can't help smiling.

**4.07**

His face when he sees JJ's baby is so placidly joyful that it's surreal. His devotion to his son is one of the things she admires most about him. Half the male agents carry a photo or two around in their wallets, but in the Bureau boys' club, plenty of them act like parenting is a side job.

She knows Haley left because she felt like family came second, but it doesn't. There's never a moment in his day when being Jack's father is an afterthought.

She loves that about him, even if she's not in love with him yet.

**4.08**

"Everything okay with Jordan?" He pulls a slice of greasy pizza from the cardboard. It's their first dinner together, even if it is post-coital and impulsive and she's only wearing a sheet.

She shrugs. "Yeah. I think it was just a combination of insecurity and Morgan being Morgan."

"He didn't…?"

"Not today. Last week at the coffee shop…different story."

It's oddly comfortable. They sit, talking about nothing important, occasionally flirting, until the pizza's gone and so is the merlot, and it's another hour before he'll let her drive.

She's surprised when he kisses her goodnight. It's starting to feel real.

**4.09**

"I'm sorry."

"For what?" Her voice has a sleepy quality he's come to associate with her being tangled in sheets and pressed against him.

"For putting you under the microscope when you started at the BAU. For making it harder than it had to be to prove yourself."

She raises herself on one elbow, hovering over him. "Hotch, I grew up with the constant fear that I was only accomplishing things because of who my mother was. You were a little bit of a jerk, but you were also the first person who's given me the opportunity to disprove that."

**4.10**

"We're _daring_ him to go after you, Hotch."

"I know."

"You have a son," she hisses. "You have a team. You have - ."

"I have a responsibility to keep people from being killed." His gaze burns. Threatens to singe her. "Just like you did when you put your life on the line for Reid. For everyone in that compound."

"Hotch - "

"I listened to him beating you."

It aches right now, not being able to touch him. "I get it."

He nods curtly. Turns, then reconsiders. "Emily."

"Sir." It comes out a whisper.

"I know what I have."

**4.11**

Something shifts that night. He sees her face when her eyes fall on Henry, hears the protective tone as she reminds Morgan to cradle his head, and in that moment he feels a door open to a future he hadn't seen coming.

He doesn't realize it's written on his face until JJ tells him that he's smiling.

He'd imagined it would be one night. In retrospect, he doesn't know how he'd thought it could be. One dance and a hand of cards have stayed with him for twelve years.

Being able to stop now that they've started something feels impossible.

**4.12**

She hasn't even reached for her wallet before he's handed the cash to the girl. She huffs a little laugh. Dominance, chivalry, and a badge are a dangerous combination.

As they walk away, he nudges her arm. "Here."

She rolls her eyes. "You shouldn't have."

"Is that how you thank everyone for flowers, Prentiss?"

"Only when there's a murder involved," she deadpans. "Although…considering it's been at least a decade since I got flowers, I guess I shouldn't complain."

The night they get back to Virginia, she finds a dozen roses on her doorstep.

She blushes until she matches the flowers.

**4.13**

"I gotta start selling tickets to your 'good cop, bad cop' act." Rossi sits across from him, a subtle smirk playing on his face.

"Prentiss is naturally sympathetic. That she's a woman is certainly helpful in these situations."

"Oh, I'm sure."

"Whatever you're getting at, Dave - "

"I'm _getting at_ the fact that you two work exceptionally well together. And it might not be a bad idea to see if you work well together outside the office. Say, over dinner."

The ambiguity of what they have doesn't allow for dinner.

Still, Hotch thinks, that doesn't mean it never will.

**4.14**

"Romantic encounter?"

"Garcia's been reading the stars again. Apparently Jupiter is going to have me taking a cold shower."

He looks at her skeptically. "Jupiter?"

"I don't know, Hotch, I'm not exactly versed in the nuances of astrology. Jupiter, Pluto…Uranus…celestial bodies don't have much of an impact on my love life. Dead bodies, on the other hand…"

"I think I'd like to keep those two topics separate for awhile."

"And ruin some perfectly creepy pillow talk?" She catches his eye as he holds open the door to the precinct.

Their brief respite leaves them lighter, warm comfort in the cold.

**4.15**

She understands why they don't realize. It's cognitive dissonance. People don't want to see the darkness in the ones they love, so they block it out. Even when it means blocking out the signs of a serial killer.

There's something freeing about being with him. She doesn't feel compelled to suppress the shadowy parts of her psyche, the blackened bits of her soul. Because he has pieces to match, and somehow, they cancel one another out.

She's never felt that before, and it's dizzying, the extent of the safety she feels in his arms.

The solace he provides is addictive.

**4.16**

Dallas gets to her. Not the crimes, not the hypocrisy, but the politics. Self-preservation, greed, backstabbing, everything that disgusted her about the diplomatic corps.

But it also reassures her that what they're doing isn't about keeping secrets. It's about honesty. With each other, they don't have to pretend.

It's late when he knocks. They sit on her sofa, sipping bourbon and watching the rain.

"She said I was the first man she met who didn't let her down."

"You're that man for a lot of people, Hotch."

For the first time, sleeping together doesn't involve sex.

There's more to this.

**4.17**

"You called the Vatican."

He looms in her doorway, dusted in snow. "Yes."

"Why?"

"I should have done it earlier. I wanted to prove I could separate the job from…this."

"Hotch."

"I can't. Separate it."

She looks away. "So what now?"

"I don't know."

"If you're going to dump me, you picked a shitty time to do it."

"That's not why I'm here." In his pockets, his fists clench. "I love you."

"Hotch…" It comes out hoarse. "Aaron."

"I'm not expecting you to say it back. Not tonight. I just needed to tell you."

In his arms, she finally cries.

**4.18**

His knuckles are still white, gripping the phone in its cradle, when he hears the knock.

"What's wrong?" She can see the anguish in his eyes, the tension radiating through his body. "Aaron?"

He closes the door behind her, locks it. "He called me."

It takes a minute. "The Reaper."

"He offered me the deal."

"You didn't take it."

He sits stiffly on the bed. "You sound sure."

"I am. I know you. You couldn't do that to the families of the victims." She sits beside him and takes one of his hands in hers. "It's not who you are."

**4.19**

The fires bring up memories of that first arson case. He'd exposed himself then, let her glimpse the man he truly was, the one whose arm is draped across her stomach, whose warm breaths tickle her neck.

Who does this job not out of perverse fascination or a hero complex, but because he craves justice.

In retrospect, it was always a given, because he had to have known what he was risking in political capital by getting between her and a drunk dignitary.

What everyone sees as adherence to protocol, she recognizes as integrity.

She never really fell.

She jumped.

**4.20**

"Nice necklace."

"My eyes are up here, Agent Hotchner."

"Wear more eye jewelry."

She huffs. "I'll have to ask Garcia. She must know where to get eyelash bangles."

"Are you calling my bluff, Agent Prentiss?"

"So now it's Agent Prentiss?"

"What?"

"Earlier. On the plane. You called me 'Emily.'"

"I did?"

"Mmhmm." She reaches for a cup, leaning low.

"My mind must've been elsewhere." His eyes aren't focused on her pendant.

She straightens up the moment Rossi steps through the door, but not before shooting him a look that throws him for just a moment, sending sparks through his veins.

**4.21**

He knows finding the Murphy boy gets to her. He's learned to read her in the way a profiler never could, but a lover can. She's agitated by the revelation that it was Danny, that a child could kill his own brother.

The day after they get home, he asks if she'd like to meet Jack. It's been coming for a while, but now, he takes the leap because he knows she needs it.

They're both cautious at first. And then she folds a piece of paper into a boat and Jack is almost as far gone as his father.

**4.22**

Hotch is pretty sure it's going to keep him up at night for a while. Even in the course of an investigation, he can't stand play-acting something he always feared his father would do.

It's part of who he is, that willingness to take the blows rather than watch them directed at someone he loves. He wonders if maybe his father realized that, and lashed out at him because he, too, would do anything to keep from hurting Hotch's mother and brother.

When they're alone again, he kisses her, and she lets him hold her until the guilt has subsided.

**4.23**

"I can't decide if you're incredibly brave or incredibly stupid." She glares, the kind reserved for unsubs about to be tackled. Her voice is raspy. "I could kill you."

He remembers a few months ago, when Jack, in his Batman pajamas, had shouted for his father to watch, and Hotch had turned to see his son leaping from the coffee table.

Jack had been fine. Hotch, less so. The fear had been all-encompassing, and for the first time, he'd yelled at his son.

The impact of her anger slams into his chest as it hits him how much they've become.

**4.24**

She tongues the Cipro and pockets the pills when no one's looking.

She's five days late.

She knows the chance is slim. And Cipro's Category C, so even then, it's a safe bet. But she's still struggling to process the reality of the situation, and coupled with the fact that the drug's a Hail Mary, she can't bring herself to take them until she's standing in the street and the gravity becomes clear.

The stab of guilt when she swallows sticks with her, even when she gets her period.

She doesn't tell him, because seeing him relieved might kill her.

**4.25**

It's the worst they've had in a while. Since before this thing between them started. Death and despair clings to them all, stinging their eyes and choking them.

He realizes almost immediately that it's going to be hell compounded, because she's so close and he can't do a thing about it.

Before, when he'd been alone, he'd thought he'd reached the nadir. It had been hard with Haley, because he had to wall off that part of him, but having her there tempered the angst.

Now, he's experienced the succor of someone who understands, and he can't have it, here.

**4.26**

Every time the knife slides into his flesh, he thinks of a reason not to die.

One_._

_Jack_.

Two_._

_Not letting Foyet win_.

Three_._

_Fixing things with Sean._

(It's getting harder to hold on.)

Four_._

_Apologizing to Haley for taking her for granted_.

Five_. _

_The half-finished profile on his desk could save a family in Oregon. _

Six_._

_Reid and Garcia will never recover._

Seven.

(Everything is numb now.)

_Morgan could be a great leader, but he needs guidance. _

Eight_. _

_JJ and Rossi deserve his thanks._

Nine.

(The thought won't crystallize as blackness creeps in, but he sees her face.)

_Emily_.


	4. Season Five

**A/N:** A quick note to say thank you for all the reviews, they're lovely. I've never been one reply to reviews individually, but I've noticed that's a thing in this fandom, so if you want to say something and have me say stuff back, there's a private message button around here somewhere.

Mild warning that next chapter will take longer, as it's the one for which I have no backlogged writing. I did this whole thing completely out of order. Seriously, I wrote a drabble for "52 Pickup" and it just spiraled. I'm very vulnerable to episode titles with numbers in them, apparently. ER's "21 Guns" set me down this rabbit hole nine years ago and five fandoms later I'm trapped. Apparently I'm also very vulnerable to shipping dark-haired, moderately tortured couples on workplace dramas in which the female counterpart has small-screen roots in the heyday of NBC programming. *shrug*

* * *

Season Five

You bear the scars  
You've done your time  
Listen to me  
You've been lonely, too long

(The Civil Wars)

**5.01**

"They're safe." Her fingers ghost over his.

"You aren't."

"Aaron. He doesn't know."

"He's been one step ahead of us the entire time. He wants me to suffer." It hurts to turn his head, but he does, eyes intense, boring into her. "You know I'm right. I can't make you a target."

She does know. Continuing as they are will endanger her, and knowing that could push him to his breaking point. "We'll take it a day at a time."

"We can't - "

"Don't ask me for more than that."

His eyes fix on hers, grief reflected. "I won't."

**5.02**

The knock reverberates, stinging his scars.

"You shouldn't be back here."

"You shouldn't be alone."

Behind her, he bolts the door. "We said - "

"Let me help tonight. Please."

He knows what she's offering. "I can't."

"You're not using me. I need this as much as you." Needs him not to hurt.

"Emily - " He can't look at her.

"Aaron." She moves closer, brushes her thumbs over his eyelids, coaxing them open. "I love you. Let me help."

Something shatters in him, hearing the words, and he feels it. Feels _her._

Foyet hasn't taken that part of him.

**5.03**

Rossi's advice echoes in his brain. Hotch has an inkling that it wasn't just Jack he'd been talking about. And he's not sure it was Haley, either. Dave's always seen more than he lets on.

Maybe he's overthinking the intent. Either way, he rolls it around in his mind. He has enough regrets, one failed marriage already. Rossi's got three, but it's the one he never had that he regrets.

He doesn't know how it hasn't occurred to him before, but now that it has, it's a certainty.

When all of this is over, he's going to marry Emily Prentiss.

**5.04**

She knows Morgan is worried. Thinks Hotch is off his game.

It's killing her that she can't defend him the way she wants, because what she knows is basically privileged information. Things she understands because when they're alone, his defenses fall a little and she can peer inside.

She knows that his senses have been sharpened to fine points since Foyet.

In the few stolen moments they've had, he's become almost obsessed with making her come. Part of it's about control, but mostly, it's the upside of his hyperawareness.

But she can't exactly lay it out for Morgan like that.

**5.05**

"Are you doing all right?"

She sits beside him at the bar. Their new routine. If Foyet's watching, he'll see a drunk, demoted agent being driven home by his pitying former subordinate.

He won't see the file marked "Foyet" Hotch is reading or the soda in his glass.

"I think that's my line," she murmurs.

"I'll be fine." He almost manages a smile. "I meant the case. I didn't know if…"

"If it brought up regrets?"

"I didn't say 'regrets.'"

"I know." She sips his Coke. "I did."

"Emily." His eyes fix on hers. "You'll be a wonderful mother someday."

**5.06**

"What?"

"What?" She nudges his foot.

"You've been looking at me funny since we left Oklahoma."

"I just…" She shrugs. "I've never seen you so much as mislabel a report. Hearing you mouth off to Morgan was kind of amusing." Her voice drops to a murmur. "And a little bit sexy."

"I didn't mouth off. I made the very valid point that he wouldn't have waited for backup."

"You don't have to defend yourself to me, Hotch. I just said I enjoyed it."

"You would."

"Damn right I would."

It's the first real smile she's seen from him in months.

**5.07**

"Do I want to know how you dressed in high school?"

"That depends. Do you have a secret Goth fetish?"

"No." He rests a hand on her bare back. It's the first time they've had together since their one night after Foyet. As ludicrous as it was to arrange, it's worth it, he thinks. "Do you?"

"Yes, Hotch. I want you in eyeliner and a fishnet G-man suit."

He can't help but grin, and she has to follow. She's missed seeing him happy.

"What's your favorite track?"

"Hmm?"

"White Album."

"Oh." It's muffled by his mouth on her neck. "Blackbird."

**5.08**

She's never felt so helpless. Even inside the compound, even in that basement with blood trickling down her face, she had the control. Everything that happened was a calculated risk, her own decision. For all the danger she's been in, the only thing that's come close to tying her hands was politics.

He'd set her free, more than once, from those bindings. Now, she's watching Foyet torture him, and she's paralyzed.

She thinks of Jack, who she's only met twice and already loves. Of Haley, who Hotch will always love.

Of him, walking into an ambush he might not survive.

**5.09**

He watches them. Jack sits in her lap, grasping a crayon, entranced by the graceful way Emily colors.

He hasn't told Jack his mother is dead. He'll do it when Emily leaves.

She won't yet. Even when he asks. She knows he's too raw right now to be a father. Too busy being a widower. Fingers brush over his hair, barely touching him. No pressure. "I'll go when you're ready," she tells him.

He knows she'll be the one to decide when that is, and he stops fighting it.

He doesn't want to be the one to make decisions anymore.

**5.10**

She tries not to feel hurt when she hears of Strauss' offer secondhand. She doesn't have any claim to this decision, to how he handles Haley's death and single parenthood.

But she can't bite back the growing unease, the longer she goes without hearing his voice.

She's known she loved him for awhile, but it's only now that she's realizing she wants a future with him. Wants to be a part of Jack's life, be with both of them through this, and then, maybe, something else. Something that involves all of them and permanence.

But Foyet might've taken that, too.

**5.11**

"How's your head?"

Even over the phone, she can tell he's exhausted. "Same as it was the other times you asked. I'm fine, Hotch." All she hears is his breathing. "Aaron?"

"I hate this."

"I know." And she does. She was there beside him after Foyet. Both times. "Listen to me. I'm okay. Jack is okay."

"I know." His sigh crackles over the line. "I just - "

"You're afraid you're going to wake up and find yourself alone."

Sometimes their similarities, how far they extend, scare him.

"You're not alone, Aaron."

He's not. But today he came too close.

**5.12**

He used to have a photo in his office of Jack at one, perched atop a carousel horse, Haley holding him steady and smiling.

Jessica had been the one to take it. He'd been working. It's hard to look at the photo these days.

The Saturday after they return from Atlantic City, Emily picks them up early and drives them to the National Mall. When Jack sees the carousel, his eyes light up. Outside the gate, she snaps photos.

When Hotch asks a stranger to take one of the three of them, it's all she can do not to cry.

**5.13**

They're still feeling their way through everything, trying to find the new normal.

She's short with him in Wyoming. Professional as ever, always on point, but it's a throwback to her first months at the BAU. He's afraid to push when everything's unsteady.

The puzzle seems to materialize in her bag on Thursday night, a Post-It attached.

_It will drive you crazy._

She's packing up a day later when she sees the insert and reads the story.

She's exhausted, so it takes awhile. It's not until she's recounting it to Reid that it crystalizes.

He wasn't talking about the puzzle.

**5.14**

He's quiet on the flight back, and she lets him be, only catching him as they're leaving the airstrip.

"Let me know if you want some company after you pick up Jack."

Neither of them expects him to take her up on it.

He comes home to Jack's latest drawings, neatly titled by Jessica. There's Daddy fighting bad guys; Jack and Daddy; Jack with Daddy, Mommy, Aunt Jessica, and (he'd apparently specified this) Jack's new puppy.

And there's one of Jack with Daddy and Emily.

Hotch suddenly understands why something feels like it's missing from their home, because she is.

**5.15**

The call comes while he's in the shower, buzzing on both phones. She's taken to double-checking before answering, after a post-coital near miss she'd rather not repeat. "Prentiss."

She listens to JJ on the other end and sighs. "We knew it was a matter of time."

Henry's crying in the background, and they hang up quickly. She slips off the t-shirt she'd borrowed and into the shower with him, arms coming around him from behind, chin on his scapula.

"O'Brien stabbed his father in prison."

That night, he tells her about his own father, and a little weight is lifted.

**5.16**

When Charlie Hillridge's mother asks her why they do it, this job, when they see so much darkness, she doesn't have an answer, so she borrows from Hotch himself.

_Because of days like this._

It had been her asking, then, because she couldn't fathom why he hadn't told her mother to shove it when she'd roped him into running security for the party. By drunk date or fate, they'd ended up alone, and he'd looked at her, trapped at twenty-one between adult and wild child and resplendent in red, and the admission had slipped out, the significance lost until now.

**5.17**

She can't stop thinking about it. She's considered it before - the girl in Denver planted the idea - but she realizes she's running out of time. Now, holding that little girl in her arms, being _needed_, sends an ache through her that won't subside.

The thing is, she knows she should want to adopt. She sees how badly these kids need people to love them. On top of it, she's all but aged out of the possibility. But then she looks at Hotch and she can't stop the flood of want.

She can't help wanting to carry his child.

**5.18**

"Rawson's a real piece of work."

"Cooper trusts him."

"Good for Cooper. If Morgan had asked LaSalle what she was wearing, you'd have fired him on the spot."

His eyes flash. "He asked you what you were wearing?"

"Relax, Hotch." She kisses his cheek. "I'm extremely adept at dealing with skeeveballs."

"Remind me to have Garcia send him a virus."

"Why Agent Hotchner, are you…jealous?"

"Absolutely." He cups her jaw in one hand, sweeps her hair back with the other. "He had your back. I didn't."

She smiles. "I guess you'll have to make due with the rest of me."

**5.19**

He shows up on her doorstep with waterproof earplugs, gauze, and a concerned-looking Jack. When she lets them in, Jack offers her a box of dinosaur bandages, stage-whispering that they're his favorites.

"He insisted," Hotch tells her, grinning, before his son shoots him a glare that she swears is a carbon copy and shushes his father.

It's too cute to bother explaining that he doesn't have to whisper.

They end up watching _Cars_ at a ridiculously low volume, per Jack's insistence. An hour in, Hotch turns to find Jack curled in Emily's lap, both of them asleep.

It terrifies him.

**5.20**

Morgan might not know what a "Sin to Win" weekend is, but Hotch does. She'd laid it out for him very explicitly.

It's code for her "Aaron Hotchner is an Asshole" weekend. Something about college friends and a pact and him needing to grow up.

Seeing her and Jack bonding - _bonded _\- had scared him, and he hadn't handled it well. His reaction had been panicked and visceral and what little he'd tried to vocalize had come out all wrong.

She comes to him and promises not to push, but they both know this isn't the end of it.

**5.21**

"JJ thinks I should call Rawson."

"Call him what?"

She laughs. "Hot. Although I had some different suggestions."

"Maybe you should tell her you're in a relationship."

Neither his tone nor his expression suggest he's kidding. "With who, exactly?"

"Me."

It's the fist time they've broached it, and she's mute for a minute, utterly blindsided.

"There's no official rule against it."

"And there's no guarantee one of us won't be reassigned."

"Morgan's proven he can handle the job."

The revelation that he'd sacrifice his position takes her breath away, and she kisses him, hard.

They never do finish the conversation.

**5.22**

She loves his sense of humor. It's so deadpan and rare and often incongruous with his image - of everyone, he's the last she'd expect to make a boy band reference - and she gets a kick out of how he's willing to expose it when they're alone.

They're at dinner in the District (dense population excuses them from discussing any aforementioned announcements) when he hauls her into a used bookstore and pulls an NSYNC CD from a bin.

She promises to take the fall if Reid gets suspicious, because she's selfish about keeping this side of him to herself.

**5.23**

The parallels are too obvious for her to ignore. She knows that as much as far as he's come these past months, he's not healed, and when he sees Ellie Spicer's face, he'll only see Jack.

She reaches across the clutch to rest a hand on his leg. "When we get back, let's take a couple days. Take Jack and go someplace quiet."

"And what? Act like we're a happy family?"

It's not completely unexpected, but she's not anticipating how much it hurts.

She gives him a week to decide what he wants, because she can't keep going like this.


	5. Season Six

Season Six

I have these secrets that aren't my own  
So take this how you want to  
I'm not here to judge you  
I just want to be in love with you

(Allison Crowe)

**6.01**

He comes to her too quickly, apologizes to readily.

She already knows he wants her. It's the rest of it she needs him to be sure of.

She's not surprised when he argues, but she doesn't cave. She loves him. She's just not sure she's willing to let him break her heart, because he's going to, inevitably. Repeatedly. She's going to give it over to him, because that's the only way she knows how to love.

It's a sort of stand-down she's imposed, forcing them both to reflect.

Even if she's painfully aware that her heart's already in his hands.

**6.02**

"I did everything I could to stop it."

She glances at him. "I know."

"It was over Strauss' head, not just mine."

"Hotch." Her lips part, eyes scanning his. "Do you have some twisted idea that I'd blame you for this? That it would influence the way I feel about you? Because if you do, _god_, you must think I have the emotional maturity of a basset hound."

He stands there, mute, knowing full well that his silence is only digging him deeper. But truthfully, he doesn't know what he's thinking.

He's too overwhelmed by the fear of losing her.

**6.03**

The Butcher casts a gloomy silence over them all on the flight back, the same thought rolling in their minds: who would they call with mere moments left?

Reid and Morgan picture their mothers as Rossi considers - Gideon, Carolyn, maybe his publicist. He could dictate an epilogue.

Back in the BAU, Garcia's on the same wavelength, torn between her boyfriend and best friend, as always.

Hotch is assaulted by Haley's memory and her words, and he knows that, like her, he'd never put the responsibility of finality on his son.

And Emily sits quietly, conceding to the truth: him.

**6.04**

She's honed her ability to lie from an early age, between the political sphere, the Bureau, and a rebellious youth.

The key is crafting a story that parallels the truth. The closer it is to home, the easier it is to play. And the master manipulator in her overtakes the profiler for a moment and she mentions her boyfriend.

Things unravel fast.

The upside is that truth, though - she does have an alpha male for a boyfriend, and he's watching her like a hawk. The moment things go south, he's there.

She's never doubted that he had her back.

**6.05**

They make a plan: six months. A real relationship, as real as they can get without disclosing anything to the Bureau. And then it's all or nothing.

Akron and Ellie remind them both that there's another sort of time constraint that they've yet to address. Age and biology complicate an already tangled situation and it's almost like a bubble blocking their path, very real and yet transparent enough to pretend it's not.

One touch, and it will burst.

They're trying so hard not to profile one another that they can't see the want that's reflected, iridescent, in both their eyes.

**6.06**

"Let's go get some candy, my little G-Man." He glances to Emily, hovering by the door, the Jack-o'-Lantern light dancing in her eyes and he knows she had a hand in putting together Jack's costume, even if she'll never admit it. "Ready?"

"For candy? Always."

They make a loop around the street, juggling Jack and the candy and the domesticity ought to feel strange, but it doesn't.

They work, the three of them. Kind of like the way she'd donned a suit and high-tops and explained she was "Dirty Harriet the Spy."

Divergent things coming together and ending up perfect.

**6.07**

It's one of those primal things, stashed deep in her DNA and hardwired, but still, she likes to think it's more than a biological imperative that makes him so unbelievably attractive when he's straddling the line between agent and parent.

Because he does keep them separate, usually, but now and then the line blurs, and there's just something about it that makes her want to jump him on the spot.

She sees him duck into the sheriff's office and sure enough, her biological responses kick in and she's awfully glad her self-control has evolved more than her instinct to propagate.

**6.08**

He doesn't mean to spill Penelope's secret. Except that he knows he must've meant to on some level, because he's better than that. He's been hiding a relationship with his subordinate for two years now and they've pulled it off, in plain sight of their team, because they're that good.

Maybe it's subconsciously selfish. Maybe he's testing the waters to see how they react to the revelation that Garcia's been playing what sure as hell seems like Emily judging from the wig.

Maybe they'll surprise him with how well they take it, and he'll have an idea of what's coming.

**6.09**

There's an unspoken certainty that it's going to be a bad night. With children, it's always bad, but knowing there's still a killer out there, even if it's only a matter of time until he's caught, that's like water on a grease fire.

It doesn't occur to her that the closer she gets to Jack, the more these cases are going to bother her.

She wakes in a cold sweat, startling him awake, and it only takes a second for him to register the look of terror.

It leaves him breathless, knowing that's how deep she's in this with him.

**6.10**

She pushes him on Seaver, and he can't not ask.

"Do you still think I trust women less than men?"

She considers a moment, because it's a complicated question now that she's in love with him. "I think it's harder for you to trust women than men, but once you do, it doesn't matter if they're a man or a woman. And I think you make a point of treating us equally in the field."

"I do trust you, Emily. More than anyone."

She tells him she knows, because she can't say it back when so much is still hidden.

**6.11**

He hates keeping things from her, but he doesn't have the heart to admit the truth: that after a spate of sleepless nights and ever-shortening fuses, he's gotten to the root of Jack's increasingly frequent temper tantrums.

He doesn't admit it outright, rather, Hotch figures it out when his son tells him through tears in the midst of a battle over bathtime that Emily doesn't tuck him in the way his mother had.

Jack misses his mother, and he's afraid she's being replaced.

He can't tell Emily, because he knows it will break her.

He lies because he loves her.

**6.12**

In Miami, he keeps Emily close. He's been careful to separate them as their relationship has intensified, because he has to stay objective and she's his Achilles heel. But now, he needs to test himself, prove he can handle it, because the six months are almost up and Jack's tantrums have decreased drastically.

And he's been looking at rings.

There's none of the nerves or uncertainty that he felt the last time he did this. Not a modicum of fear. Even with the risk of professional repercussions, of discord among the team, his resolve is unshakeable.

He wants her.

Endlessly.

**6.13**

She's pressed against him, safe and solid, his hands gripping her waist, and every time she moves, he pulls her closer.

(He's surprisingly smooth, and she's shocked that he's willing.)

He releases her, reluctantly, and lets her spin. She feels his eyes on her, lupine and lustful.

(There'd been a moment last night when she'd been sure he was going to take her right there in the club.)

When she spins back to face him, her blood goes frigid. It's not Hotch, anymore.

(She'd never expected she'd be happy enough that it would matter when Ian Doyle inevitably destroyed her.)

**6.14**

Something's off.

She's jumpy and exhausted, and when she picks up on the scent connection, he puts it together.

He thinks she's pregnant.

It will turn out to be precious, that brief time in which he believes it, when he's able to imagine her cradling a tiny amalgam of them in her arms. He thinks about stepping down as unit chief, a workable solution to fraternization and a guarantee he won't repeat the mistakes he's made in the past, when he missed so much with Jack.

When he realizes he's wrong, he won't let himself acknowledge the crush of disappointment.

**6.15**

He feels her pulling away before she comes to him, and it's like having the blankets ripped off in the dead of winter. He's so cold without her.

She says she needs space and needs him to not ask why, and he gives it. He doesn't have a choice, because Emily is a force of nature and he knows pushing will only create resistance.

He's can't lose her, because she's never been his. Never will be. She's her own.

Maybe that's why he couldn't find a ring. He can't bind her with metal.

All he can do is trust her.

**6.16**

She lies to Tsia when she says she doesn't trust anyone.

Despite Clyde's objection, she's still wavering, because she knows he's an asset (Clyde can't see that, but he's always had an issue with ego) and because there's no one else she'd want in the trenches, beside her, when it came down to it.

That Doyle doesn't go straight to them is a relief, but he knows her, knows she's ferociously loyal at her core, and when he mentions Jack, she makes her choice.

Doyle's singular blind spot is that there's nothing she won't do to protect a child.

Nothing.

**6.17**

She wonders if he has any idea how easily he can break her, how close she is every time she looks at him.

For days now, she's been carrying an envelope around with his name on the front. Inside is a hasty update to her will, naming Jack and Henry beneficiaries, and a letter that can't come close to explaining.

She's not sure there are words for any of it. It's not about apologies or making him understand why she did the things she did.

Mostly, it's her attempt to let him know that she never lied about loving him.

**6.18**

She wakes up two days post-op, and for a moment, she thinks it's the morphine.

He can't really be there.

Except he is.

There's barely any time, and he doesn't waste it on words. Everything she needs to know, he tells her without a sound. She's a tangle of tubes and wires but he gets his hands on her face and his forehead against hers, and she feels tears running down her face that aren't all hers.

She says his name and he just shakes his head. "Nothing's changed, Emily."

It's a lie, but in that moment, it doesn't matter.

**6.19**

He's still too numb to be angry, too bereft to question all of what's happened. He thinks it's for the best that they never told the team, because he couldn't take them looking at him and thinking he's been widowed again.

Even if that's exactly what it feels like.

JJ tells him her will makes them _de facto_ executors, but it's not until he opens the letter that he realizes that she couldn't have known.

Two weeks after her funeral, Jack asks about Emily, and he doesn't think he's ever felt anything so acutely as the pain in that moment.

**6.20**

He's suspected for a while that Rossi knows, but his assessment leaves Hotch without a doubt. They'll never actually acknowledge it outright, and that's the way Hotch wants it to be. He's not going to spill the details over Scotch or get a supportive pat on the back when a case hits too close. The fact that Rossi knows - and that it's a secret he'll keep - is enough.

Somebody knowing the implications, knowing it's different for him - it unburdens him. He's keeping too many secrets as it is.

It helps not having to carry them all alone.

**6.21**

She finds a few regular cafés in Paris and circulates just enough that she's not a fixture and not unfamiliar. Being out of place raises more alarms than not, and it's good to see faces she recognizes, even if they're strangers. She reads whatever papers she can, for cover and to stay connected, and she trawls used bookstores for crime novels because it's the closest she can get to home.

In an Internet café one morning, she comes across a story about college students being murdered and a killer arrested, and she smiles because she knows they're okay without her.

**6.22**

All he's told Jack is that Emily had to go away for a while.

He's at a loss. He can't tell Jack she's dead when she's not, and he's not stupid enough to entrust classified information to a five-year-old.

More than that, he can't take her away from Jack, not after everything. The fear he'd had of Haley being replaced hadn't just been about missing his mother, it had been about loving Emily, too.

So when Jack asks him if Emily will come to see him play soccer one day, he says he hopes so.

At least it's the truth.

**6.23**

He tells them to go ahead once they've packed up, and turns as though he's going to speak to the local authorities. Instead, he takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his pantlegs, and stands there in the surf for a moment.

For a moment, he's beside her as she dangles her feet off the edge of the pool, heels beside her, dress hiked up, black-polished toenails distorted by the water. She's gazing at him expectantly, and he hasn't got a choice but to join her.

Maybe she's looking at the ocean, wherever she is.

It's a big sea.

**6.24**

He's getting tired of being told to pick an option like the Bureau's doing him a favor. Really, he keeps getting stuck deciding between shit sandwiches on a silver platter.

He picks Pakistan because it involves screwing over the fewest members of his team.

It has nothing to do with how it's not getting any easier to walk past her empty desk in the morning or the way he feels her absence when they're in the field, like he's constantly walking around without his gun and vest.

Or that it's the only place that might not remind him of her.


	6. Season Seven

Season Seven

Désolé, if someone is prayin' then I might break out  
Désolé, even if I scream I can't scream that loud

(Damien Rice)

**7.01**

She's exhausted, physically and emotionally. It's not until she's saying goodbye to Declan that she begins to let herself feel it all.

Even then, the full weight only comes down on her as she's standing in Hotch's bedroom, staring at a closet full of her things.

He's been waiting for her, while she's been trying to let go. Of him, of Jack, of her friends, everything. This whole life she had.

Seeing his expectations is her breaking point. Months of restlessness hit her in a tidal wave, and she grabs onto him like an anchor as she surrenders to sleep.

**7.02**

She has no problem slipping back into her role in the field. It's her role as Emily that doesn't seem to come naturally anymore. She spent months stripping that part of her away, and now it's her own skin, but it's been grafted back on and hasn't quite taken.

Still, she fights to normalize her relationships with the team and with Jack. And maybe that's why it's so pronounced, the way she's unsettled with him. Officially, she's staying at the Ambassador's residence but she sleeps beside him every night, most and least herself at once.

He feels her slipping away.

**7.03**

She knows what if feels like to have her life erased. On paper, she's alive, but she feels like nothing's familiar. Not because her friends have been replaced, but because they look at her like she has.

What Dolan's wife says about his bolt-hole, though - that's what hits her hardest. Because the same is true for her. She's always had an exit strategy, and Doyle's death hasn't changed that.

She doesn't think she can breathe without an escape hatch, and she realizes so long as she does, she can't have a life with Jack and Hotch.

It's not fair.

**7.04**

She'd slept beside him following her return, but never with him. She'd only touched him to grip him in the dark, fingers bunched in his shirt, and he'd known.

She tells him they can't go back. He'd fight her if it weren't so evident from the bruises of her hold, from how she shakes sometimes as he strokes her hair.

By the time they head to Boise, the only remnants of her in his apartment are memories. For Jack, at least, she leaves something tangible, a blanket of hers he'd requisitioned in her absence.

Their future is Doyle's final casualty.

**7.05**

She doesn't know where she gets off giving Rossi advice on first loves and second chances. She has a two-decade string of bad boyfriends behind her, a pseudo-engagement to an international terrorist who tried to kill her, and a secret relationship with her boss that ended in a literal identity crisis.

She thought she loved a couple of the bad boyfriends, she did love the terrorist, and she's still head-over-heels for her boss.

The real kicker is that he brought her back from the dead and still loved her, and she couldn't take what he offered.

She's just that broken.

**7.06**

"It was too hard after he died," Rossi says, gazing at the small grave beside Carolyn's. "We didn't know what to say, so we just…stopped talking."

She stands beside him. "But you kept loving each other."

"Something you know a little about, huh?"

Her mouth drops open. "I - "

"Shut up and listen to me for a second, kiddo. I've got more regrets than books I've sold and no kids to learn from my mistakes. So you're going to be the beneficiary of my wisdom." He turns to her, gripping her arms. "Don't you ever give up on love."

**7.07**

They're grounded until morning in Kansas. He knocks, knowing she's still awake, and she lets him in without a word.

"Thought you might want company."

He's the only one she's ever told. She's not afraid of storms, per se, but they make her edgy. She and Sergio are kindred spirits in that regard.

"Storm knocked out the cable."

"Blackjack?"

They've never once acknowledged that long-ago hand, and she's suddenly compelled to push. "You're twelve in the hole plus interest."

His voice is low, almost wary. "I think I owe you a hell of a lot more than twelve dollars, Emily."

**7.08**

"_You put streaks in your hair because it's a constant reminder of how much you two looked alike."_

She'd been dying it constantly since the moment she was extricated. It made sense - a safety precaution, something to distinguish her from Lauren. In Paris, she'd let it fade, a last vestige of Emily.

She'd dyed it back the moment she got the call.

It took her ages to figure it out, and that's a testament to how much this has screwed her up, because it's Psych 101.

She just wants them to look at her the way they used to.

**7.09**

"You okay?" She's squirming in the passenger's seat, trying not to scratch, and it reminds him so much of Jack that it's hard not to laugh.

"I'm not the one who needs an oatmeal bath."

"Hotch." She shoots him a look, and the emotion in her eyes is as raw as her skin.

Because she knows it got to him. His childhood had been a specter in the barracks, a permeating reminder of hospital corners and rack checks and rationed affection.

In his life, he'd never anticipated letting anyone in as far as he has her.

Nevermind letting her go.

**7.10**

She finds him before he finds her, because it's a race to concede.

She tells him he should go biking, because he deserves to be happy, and stares at her mug the whole time so she doesn't have to see him looking like he's been punched.

She makes sure Dave knows where she stands, even feeds him a few lines.

It's not just that she wants to see him happy. It's that she doesn't know how to close out that chapter of her life while the door's still open.

She throws the match, because she's going to lose either way.

**7.11**

Caleb reminds Hotch how completely destructive love can be. With Caleb, there was something broken from the start - that much is clear - but Hotch can't help considering how much his unrequited love for his best friend played a role in his actions.

Haley made him promise to teach Jack how to love. She didn't mean he should let Jack watch it tear him to pieces.

He catches Emily's eye, watches her grin at Reid's surprise, sees the way it lights her up. He still loves her.

He promises himself, for Jack, that he won't let it destroy him.

**7.12**

"Do you think of me as a victim?"

"I think of you as Emily Prentiss."

"Hotch - "

"It doesn't mean you haven't been victimized. It means it's not what I think about when I look at you." He wants to touch her. "Do you think of me as one?

"No."

He almost reaches for her this time, catching himself. "You know, it doesn't have to be me, but you should tell someone."

She doesn't answer. She can't. Because she's just not strong enough to open herself up like that and keep the pieces of her heart from spilling out.

**7.13**

"I have a crazy idea."

"Let me guess…you want us to go undercover as showgirls."

"I want Reid to go undercover as Reid."

"The bureau approved the buy-in?" She laughs a little. "I knew you could negotiate, but that's…"

He smirks. "Dave."

"_Dave_."

"As for negotiating…" He raises an eyebrow.

"That's not fair."

"It's not my fault Rossi can't say 'no' to you."

It's his fault she can't say no to him, though. She's pretty sure she'd give him anything he asked for, short of herself.

Because she's still broken, and she won't give herself back to him in pieces.

**7.14**

He keeps reminding himself that when everything with Emily had started, he'd still been a little bit in love with Haley. He'd been clinging to it out of fear, and Emily had given him the strength to let go.

He knows he's not going to have many chances, and he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life clinging to a sliver of hope. He wants to keep his promise to Haley.

He's nervous when he asks Beth to dinner, but there's no guilt. He's taking control, showing Jack how to live and to love.

Denial's a stealthy beast.

**7.15**

He shows up at her place with Jack and Chinese, and she almost laughs because of course he'd know she'd be battling to make dinner one-handed and needing a Jack-sized hug.

Jack falls asleep against her in the middle of _Shrek_, wrapped in her good arm. She catches Hotch's eye. They both see it - how easy it would be to fall back into this.

"You should get him home," she tells him quietly.

It takes everything he has not to kiss her goodbye.

She cries herself to sleep that night, and it has nothing to do with getting shot.

**7.16**

It's only her need to distance herself that keeps her from hitting "Uncle Derek" when he tells Jack they have to leave the girls alone because they're tired from their "special mission to rescue the tequila worm."

And yeah, her head's killing her and she kind of wants to shoot the sun for being bright, but that's not what's exhausting.

What's exhausting is convincing herself that she's glad Hotch is moving on. That seeing Jack's eyes light up at Beth's praise doesn't make her feel like her heart's been ripped out.

And she succeeds, because she's that good at pretending.

**7.17**

He watches her as the others trickle out, and he knows she's waiting for something. That's the extent to which he has her memorized, that the way she sits at her desk tells him everything that profiling never will.

Garcia shuffles in ten minutes later, tears trickling down her face, and he puts it together. It's Emily, not Morgan, who's there, waiting, because Emily's reflexively maternal in a way none of them, not even JJ, can approximate.

He hates himself a little, because she should be someone's mother, and he didn't give that to her when he had the chance.

**7.18**

"Emily."

It startles her, because he rarely uses her first name when they're on the job. Since that's all they are anymore, it's been awhile.

"You did an excellent job today. We wouldn't have saved that boy without the information you got from Allen's daughter."

"I just did my job. You should be talking to Morgan."

"I already did. Stop selling yourself short. Getting her to remember required enormous trust, and you built that in a very short time."

"I - "

"I'm ordering you to accept the praise, Prentiss."

She does, but it doesn't feel like it used to.

**7.19**

She sees the despair in his eyes as they gather outside the house, tying up loose ends. The slight limp as he climbs into SUV. The tension radiating from him as they fly home.

He blames himself. She knows him.

Knows how to comfort him. Knows that while nothing will immediately disabuse him of the notion he's somehow at fault, there's things she can say to help him get there. Knows how much to push and when to hold him.

She knows what she felt for him hasn't gone away.

She doesn't know how to stop herself from loving him.

**7.20**

"Prentiss, can I see you for a minute?"

Loaded question if she ever heard one. "Sure."

Behind his office door, he's tentative. "I just wanted to check in. I thought…I don't know if the case brought anything up."

"Oh." She honestly hadn't considered the parallels. She's too good at compartmentalizing.

"If you wanted to talk about it…it doesn't have to be me, but if you'd like to…my door's open."

"Thank you. I'll think about it. Honestly." She turns to go.

"Emily." He reaches out without thinking, hand bypassing her arm, cupping her jaw. "It'll always be open. No matter what."

**7.21**

"Emily likes getting letters."

Hotch glances to the door, where Rossi's staring at him, eyebrows raised. "What?"

"Just thought it might be something you'd want to know."

"Dave - "

"I'm just passing along a piece of information, Aaron. What you do with it is none of my business."

Like Rossi's ever considered _anything_ not his business.

He's not sure why Dave's changed his tune after pushing him with Beth, but at the back of his mind he knows Rossi's a master profiler.

To him, the way Hotch still looks at Emily is a neon sign, burning bright with desire.

**7.22**

Before Doyle, she was like them. She thought profiling was who she was, like Rossi. She couldn't imagine doing anything else, like Reid. She was willing to face the unthinkable because it was worth it, like Morgan.

Like all of them, some of the cases became a part of her. Not just the personal ones, like Matthew and John, or the ones that left physical scars, like Cyrus, but Carrie, whose courage floored her, and Roy Woodridge, a soldier at war with his mind.

Now they all just haunt her, like ghosts.

She's terrified it's because she's one of them.

**7.23**

There's a moment before the blast hits her when she starts to smile, because it's such an absurd way to die after the year she's had.

She comes to a minute later with a mouthful of debris, and that's what she gets for laughing in the face of death, she thinks. She coughs and spits slivers of concrete until she's lightheaded, her ears ringing harshly, and for the first time in months, she knows she's alive.

She feels like she's been trapped in a sea of grey, between dead and living, for so long.

Maybe she's finally been jarred loose.

**7.24**

In the end, she doesn't overthink it.

The job is incredible, and so is the city, and she needs to put distance between them for both their sakes. She'll never be able to reclaim herself when she thinks of herself as his, and he'll never have the normalcy he and Jack deserve so long as she's within reach.

"You'll always have a place with us," he tells her, and she knows he's not just talking about the team.

"Thank you," she murmurs, and kisses his cheek, and it's the same as seventeen years ago, the first time she said goodbye.


	7. Season Eight

Season Eight

The day I knew you'd not come back  
I built this castle out of glass

(The Decemberists)

**8.01**

It would be so much easier if he could tell them. Reassure them that not only did Emily sign off on Blake, she _recommended_ the woman. He'd had to fight for her, convince Strauss that another linguist was necessary, stressed how Blake's existing rapport with Reid would save everyone time and energy. Feigned ignorance to their history.

But Emily had been adamant. Blake had to be accepted on her own merits, in her own way, because it was the only way they'd build the trust they all needed.

And, as usual, Emily is right.

Even if it makes everything harder.

**8.02**

He hates empathizing with unsubs. Granted, Ellen and Darlene aren't their typical unsubs. Their motivations aren't totally nefarious - immoral, yes, but not evil. Hotch doesn't understand evil.

He understands pain.

He's only ever wanted two people dead: George Foyet and Ian Doyle. Not because they were both depraved men, but because they took the only women he's ever loved. Hotch understands from experience that a righteous kill won't ease the pain. What anger fades is only replaced by grief.

Both women will learn, soon enough, that nothing will fix what's been broken. And for that, Hotch truly feels sorry.

**8.03**

He knows he's supposed to want Beth to stay - it's not as though he wants her to leave, not as though he's eager to get rid of her, because he really does like her - but when she tells him about the job in New York, he's genuinely glad for her.

There's not that visceral, gnawing need to have her close. He enjoys her company and companionship and the sex is good, but he doesn't love her.

He thinks he could, someday. But he's starting to realize it'll never be like it was with Emily.

Nothing ever will be.

**8.04**

Jack's a ball of energy when Hotch returns from New Mexico, moving and speaking in a blur, and Jess has to translate.

"Sergio sent a care package," she informs him, smiling. She's always been strangely comfortable with Emily's role in their lives, but then, they share a willingness to go to the ends of the earth for Jack.

It's a stuffed replica of Sergio proper and a note Jack won't let him read, because it's between him and the cat.

In London, Emily wakes to a photo of Jack clutching the toy in his sleep, and it makes her day.

**8.05**

The similarity her new office bears to Hotch's isn't all that strange, at first. She's the boss, so the big windows overlooking the bullpen are fairly standard.

As she settles in, she makes it her own, but it's not until months later that it registers. She's unconsciously cloned his office, and now she knows why it feels like home.

After JJ sends a framed photo of Reid and Henry on Halloween, she takes it along with the ones from her office and places them around her flat and tries to believe that, eventually, it'll feel like she's home here, too.

**8.06**

"Sharp tie."

He glances down, then to Rossi. "Thanks. It was a birthday gift from Beth."

"She has a good eye."

"Mmhmm."

"The geometric patterns, they're sophisticated without being flashy. Silver, representing focus, balance - "

"Why are we talking about the meaning of my tie, Dave?"

"I just figured I'd help you out."

"With what?"

"You have that look. It's a nice tie. Stop profiling it."

Rossi's right, of course. He's bothered by it, because it's elegant and expensive and not him at all, and he's not sure what that says about his relationship.

He doesn't wear it again.

**8.07**

When he hears Rossi telling his Marine Sergeant that the country owes him for his service, his mind goes to her.

For Rossi and Scott, service was defined. For Emily, service to her country was nothing but ambiguity.

Everything she did, grey areas and all, was for the greater good: taking down one of the most dangerous men on the planet. She risked life and sanity, and when she came home, she couldn't tell a soul.

In a moment of wild clarity, Hotch takes it upon himself to make amends.

He hopes nominations for the Medal of Freedom are anonymous.

**8.08**

Cyber crimes are fast becoming the bane of her existence. She thinks that if people would just keep their illicit business to the servers in their own damn countries, she might actually get a lunch break now and then.

When the Gods of Combat case comes across her desk, she makes the most of it and has her assistant schedule a call.

The shrieks on the other end tell her that Garcia didn't let them in on who they'd be briefing.

In the moment her presence registers, she sees the flash of raw emotion on Hotch's face, and it aches.

**8.09**

Reid's rattling on about colors and symbolism on the plane ride back, and expert as he is at tuning the kid out, Hotch can't stop himself from hearing Reid wax verbose on red, and it unfurls in his mind like a flag marking a claim.

Red is Emily's color.

He remembers the eyes on her that night, following, hungering, the way, when something more than a gaze had touched her, he'd acted on primal instinct to protect what was his.

There's a magnetism that's always bound them together, her red fused to his cool blue, her fire melting his ice.

**8.10**

Hotch knows something about the way things should've been.

He should've made more of an effort to be at home after Jack was born. He should've appreciated Haley more.

He should've realized sooner that Foyet was the Reaper. He should've taken the deal and worked the case in secret. He should've swept his apartment that night before Foyet got the jump on him. He should've gotten to Haley before Foyet could.

He should've known about Emily's past and protected her from Doyle. He should've married her. He should've talked about children.

He should've fallen out of love with her already.

**8.11**

She thinks a lot about death. In her line of work, she has to, though less so now that she's not perpetually sporting Kevlar.

Before the JTF, it was a sort of abstract, a risk she'd signed up for when she joined. It didn't become real until Doyle, or rather, just before she went under. When she'd had to write a will.

Now, though, she's died. Twice. Lauren first, buried deep, then Emily with her.

It had been that feeling, the paradox of living death, that had driven her from D.C.

At least here, no one knows she's a ghost.

**8.12**

"It'd be too hard, Emily."

"I know." A breath rushes from her lips. She wants so badly to be there for Reid, but she knows she'll have to leave in a few days and that'll just reopen the wound.

"Stop."

"Stop what?"

"You didn't abandon him."

Heat coils in her stomach because he can still read her from across an ocean, without seeing her face.

And that's what Reid got, she realizes, even if it was brief. Much as he's hurting, she has to think it'll set him free a little, knowing it's possible for another person to truly understand.

**8.13**

Bryan doesn't keep his end of the deal, but Hotch does, sort of. He makes sure that people see Bryan's art.

Or rather, a person.

It's an accident, really. Except he's pretty sure, looking back, that his subconscious was setting him up. Because of all the cases, this is the one that Beth would find interesting, that provides a safe segue from art to murder. From her life to his.

He knows he didn't have to go into detail - the eyelids were a bit much - but this is his every day.

She needs to know what she's getting.

**8.14**

Now and then, she'll get a text or an email from one of them, telling her to call another. She likes knowing they still count her among their tangled mess of distinct and interconnected parts, the ineffable dynamic that bonds them all.

Hotch rarely tells her outright, just buries the implication in the facts of a case.

She calls JJ whenever there's a sister.

And when JJ fills in the gaps Hotch left unspoken, about an alcoholic father with a temper, she wonders if he'd known, on some level, that she'd call him the moment she hung up with JJ.

**8.15**

They're all scarred, figuratively and literally. They have to be, to do what they do, see what they see, and live with it. They've all touched darkness to some extent, and it's burned them. They heal, but the scar remains. Numb.

The first night back, in his bedroom, Emily had undressed in front of him. He'd seen the hesitation as she'd removed her shirt and so he'd gone first, exposing himself so she could see how they matched.

He's realizes, looking at Paul and Mitchell, that they're bound by those scars.

He thinks maybe it's something that can't be broken.

**8.16**

"The unit's being targeted by someone replicating past cases and he's escalated to personal contact. I want a detail with you at all times."

"Hello to you, too, Hotch."

"Emily, we have no way of knowing if his vendetta is limited to our current members. Don't think I'm not willing to go over your head."

There's a roughness to his voice that she hasn't heard since the day Haley died, and it tells her everything.

"I'll take whatever measures you do."

He should've seen that coming. It's so sublimely Emily and he smiles for the first time in days.

"Deal."

**8.17**

She gets a rundown of every case since she's been gone, and updates on ones they're working. It's excessive, she knows, but she doesn't ask him to stop. It makes her feel warm in a way it shouldn't when he sends her a list of possible signatures, of things the Replicator might mimic, details to watch out for. It's meticulous, bordering on neurotic, but it feels good.

She's formed relationships here, but there's not that connection. Even after Doyle, his presence had been grounding, tethering her as she struggled to find footing.

It feels good, knowing he has her back.

**8.18**

When he calls to fill her in on the latest case, it's different.

It has to be, because the case is so personal for Morgan. He finds a link to the footage of Morgan speaking and she watches it with him on the other end, reacting in real-time.

They've stayed away from talking emotions in the time she's been gone, sticking carefully to safe topics - work, Jack, current events, nothing too deep. But this is deep, it has to be, and it breaks that barrier they keep up.

It feels too easy, too good, and they both know it.

**8.19**

He tries to take something good from a case now and then.

Sometimes it's a present for Jack, to letting him know he's always on his father's mind.

Sometimes it's a picture for Beth, a vista or some interesting graffiti to make her smile.

Sometimes it's a pen to remind him of Emily, because she had a thing for stealing pens wherever they went.

When he returns from Colorado, he and Jack make a time capsule. Photos, drawings, a few knick-knacks, an FBI baseball cap: all to be opened in twenty-five years.

At the last minute, Hotch adds a pen.

**8.20**

The way Reid's acting brings him back to the days after they'd lost Emily.

Hotch has watched him grow up since joining the unit, and he's seen Spencer acclimate to social norms and soften the sharp edges of his awkwardness in a way none of them expected.

After Doyle, they'd all watched him, like parents afraid to leave a child. JJ had practically found herself looking after two toddlers between Henry and a reverted Reid.

Now, like then, Hotch is at a loss. Because he still falls asleep every night fearing his own dreams and the women who haunt them.

**8.21**

His phone pings on the flight back, the middle of the night for them, morning for her.

_Saw your press conference. Did JJ dress you guys?_

His brows furrow, and he replies with a series of question marks.

A winking emoticon accompanies her response.

_You all wore blue. Nice profiling._

He's thinking of a comeback when another message appears.

_P.S. Your fly was down._

No one else would ever say that to him. Let alone make him smile.

In the morning, there's a link to the footage in his inbox, because she knows he needs to make sure she's kidding.

**8.22**

He overhears Blake telling Reid about Harvard. Hears her tell him she's tired of going home to an empty house.

He knows his mind should immediately go to New York, to Beth, but there's a visceral reaction and his mind is automatically calculating the flight time to London.

He schedules the trip to New York as soon as they're home. Tells himself it's just been too long since he's seen Beth.

Tries to stop wondering what would happen if he flew to London instead and told her.

His house isn't empty. But too often, it feels like his soul is.

**8.23**

He's on the phone with Beth when she says the l-word the first time.

It catches him off guard, and he fumbles spectacularly. She just laughs and tells him to breathe, and that it's okay if he's not there yet, and he believes her on both counts.

He spends the train ride to New York trying to make sense of things as Jack pores over _Bunnicula_, and it strikes him that he doesn't _want_ to stop loving the woman who sent it.

He gives himself permission to love two women at once, because it's the only option he has left.

**8.24**

"Aaron?"

She hasn't called him that in over a year. Longer since she's called him that in the middle of the night. "Emily."

"What's wrong?"

"It's - " It's harder than it used to be to detach. "The Replicator. Strauss is dead, Emily."

There's a sharp intake of air, a catch in her voice. "When?"

"Tonight. I wanted to make sure - "

"I'm safe, Aaron. He's not after me." The conversation is an echo. "I'll take precautions."

The words come accidentally. "She died in my arms."

Another echo comes over the line. "Then she wasn't afraid. You made sure."


	8. Season Nine

A/N: Um, so...I like reviews. So if you read the story, would you mind? I'm all insecure and stuff so it would be nice to know what people think. Good or bad.

* * *

Season Nine

I never noticed, hadn't seen it as it grew  
The void between us where the flame turns blue  
(David Gray)

**9.01**

Every now and then, he gets a reminder that if he stays stuck on what he had with Emily, he'll never be able to move forward. Wallace is another alarm bell.

He's been dreaming about her. Nothing tawdry, and no symbolism he can work out, but she's there, and when he wakes, he always wants five more minutes.

He thinks of putting her up for section chief, even if, first, she'd kill him, and second, it would be the epitome self-sabotage.

Maybe he was right all those years ago. Maybe she really will be his undoing.

Maybe he'll let her.

**9.02**

She reads about them in the paper. The old-fashioned, hard copy paper of record she gets every morning.

She cuts out the article and tacks it up in her office, and later she goes and gets copies to save for Jack and Henry, because it'll mean something someday.

This is why she likes the paper. She can find a story online and print it out, but it doesn't hold the same significance. This, this is proof of who they are. How good they are.

She doesn't care if they were trending on Twitter. She can't put that on a wall.

**9.03**

They know things about each other that no one else does. Things they've kept hidden out of fear and shame, things that are too hard to talk about. Things that no one else could begin to understand.

Outside the circle of "need to know," she's the only one aware of why he knows so much about snipers. And that, like most people who've been in his shoes, he has a number. Still does. Despite his best efforts, he can't stop counting.

He's never told anyone but her, doesn't trust anyone else to understand.

They're broken in all the same places.

**9.04**

By the time they're back from Baltimore, it's too late to call. He thinks briefly and somewhat stupidly of sending flowers until his sense kicks in and he remembers how incredibly inappropriate it would be.

Plus, she absolutely hates being thanked for doing her job. Even when it is above and beyond.

The next morning at breakfast he pawns the job off on his son, because he knows she likes things she can hoard, and she can't really get mad at him this way.

She sees through the ruse, but when she calls to scold him, he knows she's smiling.

**9.05**

She knows instantly that something is wrong. Feels it.

(He glimpses her from the corner of his eye. When he looks, she's never there.)

Rossi's quiet. "Hotch is in surgery. They think it's a complication from - "

"Foyet."

(In the sepia film, he sees a flash of red. He always loved her in red.)

He's always been their quiet champion, so it stings when Rossi reminds her she can't just get on a plane.

(He's seen those earrings before, but not on Haley.)

"Tell him I…"

"I will."

(She tells him to choose. If only it were that easy.)

**9.06**

He's never been so grateful for Penelope Garcia's eccentricities as when he puts that picture of Haley on the alter, because he can just make eye contact with the plastic ball staring at him from his wine glass.

He almost pretends to have forgotten, but then Reid puts up a picture of Maeve and he hears Emily's voice from months ago, spilling that Spencer's afraid to look weak in front of him, still confuses Hotch's stoicism with superhero status.

His _ofrenda_ is strength: a reminder of Haley's, a sacrifice for Reid, and gratitude to Emily for giving him so much.

**9.07**

He knows it will make her smile, and he tells himself that's why he sends her the video of Rossi and the Profilers, as Garcia names them two songs in. He tells himself it's innocent, that he's not sending it, at least in part, because it will make her miss them.

And it does. She watches it a dozen times, laughing and glad to see Reid smiling and, just as he'd known, it makes her ache for home. She keeps it to herself, for so many reasons, but she still thinks of it as home.

Because that's where he is.

**9.08**

It's bad enough that Gallino's stripped away their identities and their innocence, and he knows enough about brainwashing and reprogramming to know there's no guarantee they'll ever be the same.

But the last boy…he's Jack's age.

He lays awake that night and finally reaches for the phone, hesitating because he knows Beth can't understand. She's adjusting to the darkness of his job, and he shares little bits now and then, things that bother him, but this…

Emily's the only one who's seen him from both sides, as a father and an agent, who he can call when the twain meet.

**9.09**

Rossi is subdued when they return. Hotch pours and they sit silently, until a story emerges, aided by alcohol and an empty stomach.

He couches it in vagueness, but he has a feeling it's pointless. He talks about impulsive youthfulness and the blurry line between innocence and immorality, about trying to forget only to realize that nothing truly stays buried.

That night, he lays awake wondering if dancing a fraction of an inch too close to someone else had closed a part of him down to Haley, and whether he'd change things if he could.

He's not sure he would.

**9.10**

He doesn't so much study his team as it's habit by now to gauge their microexpressions, the way they move in the field, who avoids certain crime scenes.

Even though he hasn't known her as long, he's able to read Blake. Part of what makes her fit with the team is the qualities she shares with Emily, intellectually and emotionally. And it's why he can see that something about the Tafferts' grief is too familiar to her.

Later, when she confides in him about her son's death, the same age as Jack, he wishes he couldn't read her so well.

**9.11**

At some point, they've all had their personal lives dragged into a case. Sometimes more literally than others, when friends and family have gotten tangled in the mess.

For him, irrevocably so.

When the initial grief over Haley's death had worn off, he'd been assaulted by guilt, knowing how far the team had gone for him - how far _she_ had gone for him - while he'd stuck to the book when she'd come to him about Matthew.

He's never been able to shake the feeling that if he'd done things differently then, she might've come to him about Doyle.

**9.12**

Garcia calls her, breathlessly recounting her brief encore as the Black Queen. Emily's heard the origin story, as Penelope likes to call it, before, as well as Hotch's tale of their first encounter. She's appropriately silent when Garcia tells her parts she shouldn't already know.

And then come the details of the sexual harassment seminar and whatever the hell "flarpy blunderguff" is, which she implores Garcia to keep to herself.

She wonders how the perpetually unamused HR rep would feel if she knew how often Emily used to call her boss by his full title when she was undressing him.

**9.13**

He tries not to play the "what if" game, but sometimes he can't help it. In Cleveland, Walsh makes him wonder, not for the first time, where he'd be if he'd lost Jack as well as Haley.

It was Jack that kept him going in those first few weeks. He'd slept, eaten, and breathed only for his son. And still, it had been a razor-thin line he'd walked some days, just barely holding it together.

If he'd lost Jack, he's not sure there would have been anything keeping him from going down the same path as Walsh.

Not even Emily.

**9.14**

"Six hours?" The bar's nearly empty, their friends long gone.

"Three now."

"Nothing's changed, Emily."

"I know." She smiles sadly. "But…nothing's changed."

He nods, brushes a hand over hers. He knows what he's doing isn't good for either of them, but she's so close. "Come home with me."

"Hotch - "

"To see Jack. You can fly back tomorrow."

Emotion and adrenaline spark in the heat between them, and she knows what will happen if she goes with him.

"Can we just sit here awhile?"

He nods. He knows as well as she does - that's all they get anymore.

**9.15**

When Jack finds out he missed Emily, Hotch learns that his son has inherited his glare. There's no tantrum or yelling, and it scares him, because it's a controlled rage beyond Jack's years.

He's spared the eternal wrath of an eight-year-old when Beth suggests a Valentine's Day Skype date.

He sets Jack up online while he has his own rendezvous in cyberspace, and is floored to find them still engaged an hour later. When Jack glowers at the interruption, he hears a fit of hysterics from Emily's side.

Turns out, Jack takes after his father in more ways than one.

**9.16**

More kids without a home, without someone to love them, and yet, there's a woman who would. He knows she tried to downplay it, brush it off as a passing urge, but he recognized that look in her eyes when she thought he couldn't see. The way she'd smile a little sadly when she'd hold Henry, the way she'd glow when they'd go out with Jack and strangers would comment on what a beautiful family they were.

He wonders if, subconsciously, she and Jack decided to fill a vacancy in one another's lives, something just adjacent to mother and son.

**9.17**

Reid's voice carries to his office, and he hears something about the boy's mother and her on a mule being as unbelievable as Hotch on a beach. He has to smile at that, because he knows the image they all have of him, that he'd wear a suit and tie if he ever did venture onto sand.

Primarily because Emily had once confessed that she and JJ and Garcia had joked about that exact scenario.

A month after that revelation, he'd eked out a few days and taken her and Jack to Virginia Beach.

He hadn't brought a single tie.

**9.18**

There's a safe in his office, just big enough for his firearms and a pile of folders, each one marked with the name of an agent. All of them, going back to Gideon, because even though he's offered them back, not one has accepted.

In each folder is a will and an advanced directive. They know the risks they run every day.

Hearing the recording of Cunningham's brother, realizing what his parents had done, makes it hard to look at that safe for days, because inside is a piece of paper bestowing upon him an impossible responsibility: ending Emily's life.

**9.19**

He doesn't have time to process what Morgan tells him about his latest interview with Daria, because he kicks into prosecutor mode, trying to salvage their case. He realizes too late that sitting in on the trial is a mistake. Joe's been well-prepped by his lawyer and Hotch curses quietly to himself when they shift blame to Daria.

The plea deal is inevitable, and so are the nightmares.

He knows there's some lines she'd have had to cross and others she never would. But that's the catch - he knows Emily. Trusts her with his life.

Lauren was not Emily.

**9.20**

Blake's eyes are closed, but she speaks the moment he sits down. "I appreciate the concern, Hotch, but you don't have to brave the pond stink to check on me."

"I thought I'd reassure you that you wouldn't be the first agent to wash your hair in the jet's lavatory."

Her eyes open and she grins. "Bless you, Aaron Hotchner. I hadn't even thought of that."

As she hustles away, he remembers the flight from Milwaukee, Emily's hair caked with blood before JJ led her to the sink.

When she'd emerged with wet hair, it had taken his breath away.

**9.21**

He's never actually been drunk-dialed before. Drunk texted, yes, but as far as he's concerned, he's spared the annoyance because no one in their right mind would want to talk to him in that state.

Granted, he's found Emily tends to abandon her right mind when she's drinking.

He gathers something about a bad blind date but doesn't press, just listens to her ramble in Franglish and tells her about their latest case when she asks.

He wishes their complicated history wasn't a secret, because the team deserves the pleasure of hearing her try to pronounce "Mecklinburg" over and over.

**9.22**

Hotch tactfully avoids eye contact with Jack's teacher as she scuttles the class out to the waiting bus, one student lighter. With Dave's urging and assurances from the team that they'll happily pick up the slack, he's cleared his afternoon.

He leaves Jack engaged in a desk chair race with Morgan and Reid while he collects his things. When he comes back down five minutes later, he's surprised to find his son crouched by Blake's desk, the latter kneeling beside him.

Admiring the sticker Jack knows is there, because it used to be Emily's desk.

She's ever-present in their lives.

**9.23**

It's not until they're gathered at the hospital, waiting for word on Reid, that he realizes the parallel.

Five and a half years ago, Emily had put life on the line to spare Reid, and now he's done the same for Blake.

There's a litany of ways in which the two women are alike, but for Reid, it's one very common link: they've both acted instinctively as mothers, as protectors, to him. He's felt at times, discussing Reid with Emily, like they were talking about their child, rather than a peer.

He smiles, because their genius is all grown up.

**9.24**

He calls with the intention of filling her in so she doesn't have to hear bits and pieces elsewhere.

Instead, hearing her voice when she answers sets loose all of what's happened in the last few days and he lays it all bare: almost losing Reid, Blake's resignation, Garcia with a gun, all of it, and that he'd been certain in the middle of it he'd never see Jack again.

He hears himself, voice rough, asking her to come back, because he needs her.

He's too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to realize she's crying when she tells him she can't.


	9. Season Ten

A/N: So, this is it. I'm not actually sure how many people are even reading this since the reviews have been rather...scarce...but I'm planning to write something else in this fandom in the future that would be, suffice it to say, a bit less rigid. Also, this is probably not how some readers expected me to end this, but I always said my only rule was that it had to be plausible and not contradict on-screen canon.

Oh, also, a salient detail for the tag to 10.10 - Busboys and Poets is an artsy, progressive, literary, postmodernist Beatnik fever dream and the last place anyone would ever catch Aaron Hotchner dead.

* * *

Season Ten

Let us cling together as the years go by.

(Queen)

**10.01**

At least he can honestly tell Rossi that he asked.

He's not expecting Dave's surprise at her refusal. Hotch had known she'd say no. He knows how much she loves her job, how she excels at it. He wonders if she's been playing it up for him or playing it down for the rest of them.

And then it dawns on him - Dave doesn't realize how deep it went. They hid it too well. Still do.

And so it's assumed they can go back.

Hotch has to ask himself if he'd known they couldn't, why he'd asked at all.

**10.02**

The minute he hears Morgan's voice, denying Garcia his support, he picks up the phone.

Her voice answering with his given name sends a spark up his spine.

"You need to call Garcia." He lays it out clinically, almost like a profile, and he hears her soft sigh crackle over the line.

"Oh, Garcia."

And that's why he'd called her. Because Emily empathizes as deeply as Garcia feels, sees the slivers of humanity, however deep they're buried. It's why she loved Doyle. Why she loved him.

She saw things below the surface.

That empathy is why he loves her.

Still.

**10.03**

When her assistant tells her there's a call from DC, she's not expecting someone at Homeland Security on the other line. She barely has time to ask what agencies are involved in the JTF, given the rate at which she's briefed.

She feels strangely possessive whenever the BAU gets involved and she has to hear it from some deputy secretary or, worse, Lyon. It's stupid, she knows, but still - she still thinks of them as hers.

And, of course, he knows that.

He makes sure he's the one who gets to brief her at the end of the day.

**10.04**

He doesn't have bugs crawling beneath his skin.

He has Emily crawling under it. Creeping through his veins, making his hair stand on end, and he doesn't know how to exorcise her any better than Leo knew how to get rid of his invisible bugs.

The solution should be the same, really - stop scratching the itch. Stop letting it overtake his life.

Except he's been doing that for two years and it won't go away.

When Beth tells him about the offer in Hong Kong, he can't ask her to stay.

Not when he can still feel Emily everywhere.

**10.05**

Her window's closed. Maybe not officially, but still - she'll never be someone's mother.

And it's her choice. She chose career over kids, and most days, she's okay with that. She knows JJ and Hotch manage, but given her own childhood, she doesn't think managing would be enough for her.

Other days, it aches. The photo of a somnolent Vader that pings on her phone hurts down to her bones, not just because she'll never have a child, but because she gave up her chance at _that_ child, who she loves like her own.

London's never felt emptier than this.

**10.06**

It's because of Haley that he knows so much about fairytales. She'd loved them, the dark originals by the Grimm brothers and Anderson and the Disney versions, obscure stories she'd find in used bookstores and dramatized epics.

She'd never had delusions about them translating to reality, but it hadn't made him feel any less guilty for the way their story had ended.

When they get home, he finds himself going through the shelves of books she collected over the years, suddenly feeling nostalgic for a certain story.

There's always been something enchanting to him about _Snow White and Rose Red._

**10.07**

She's battling insomnia after a nonstop week, irritated by how neatly they've wrapped things up, because she's listless without someone to suspect or a plot to foil.

She ends up going through the boxes that have been masquerading as coats in her closet, because it never seemed like a priority to unpack them.

It's junk, mostly: old magazines, a random remote control, a snowglobe she'd bought for a gift swap, a few of Sergio's long-lost toy mice.

Tucked in a book she forgets buying, she finds a precious memory: her and two Hotchners, captured at an angle by Aaron's reach.

**10.08**

Boston drains him. There's too many memories there. Too much pain.

Plus, Jack's handling the breakup with Beth almost too well, and he's concerned, so he seizes the opportunity for a long weekend.

Jack's been begging to see _Harry Potter_ World.

He pulls out some interrogation skills to steer Jack onto the subject, because broomsticks take precedence, but eventually they talk, and Hotch realizes his son grew up when he wasn't looking.

As they're picking out postcards the next day, Jack pulls one from the rack and, with a knowing look to rival Rossi, suggests they send it to Emily.

**10.09**

"Hey, Grandpa."

Rossi groans. "You're killing me, all of you. I haven't heard my own name in a week."

"Immersion program. Hotch sent a memo."

"He would, wouldn't he?"

She taunts him on and off for the better part of an hour as he tells her everything, and the pop of a cork in the background suggests she's hearing more than the others have.

She knows the bottle's nearing empty when gravel weighs down his words. "I have a family, Emily."

"You always have."

There's a telltale cough of an aging Italian fighting off emotion. "Right back at you, kiddo."

**10.10**

He doesn't give Audrey his number, but he's barely surprised when she calls.

Obviously, Dave took it upon himself.

Still, he's a gentleman, and offers to play tour guide.

They meander through Barracks Row and Eastern Market, up past the Folger Library toward Massachusetts. As they're passing Busboys and Poets, a memory assaults him: Emily dragging him to a reading, looking so out of place it was borderline hilarious.

Audrey interrupts his rumination. "The one that got away or the one that broke your heart?"

Damn. Maybe she could be a profiler. "It's complicated."

She smiles ruefully. "It always is."

**10.11**

She has Reid text her, and times out when to call.

"How did you manage?" JJ asks, voice devoid of everything but fatigue.

"I didn't. I'm still not. I love London, but I'm still just the walking dead."

"Emily - "

"He took everything I had, JJ. I don't know what I have to do to make it mine again, and I don't know what you have to do, but if you want to talk to somebody who's just as fucked up, I'm here."

"Mutually assured destruction?"

"Or _Thelma and Louise_. Somebody beside you on the way over the cliff."

**10.12**

He'd been on the phone with her last night. This morning, technically - he hadn't realized until they'd hung up that it was getting light out.

The last time he'd spent that long on the phone was in college, Haley quizzing him on statutes all night, their desperate attempt to stay connected.

He sleeps through his alarm for the first time in a decade and covers by telling Garcia he'll meet them at the plane. He's glad she's not a profiler because he's sure there's a tell he can't hide.

Hotch hadn't realized it was possible to fall even further.

**10.13**

Gideon's taught him a thousand things, and his death makes a thousand and one.

Hotch doesn't want to die with regrets.

He doesn't want to live with them, either.

Dawn's barely breaking when he gets there, but she only hesitates a split second before letting him in.

"Is Jack okay?"

"Yes."

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"Good." She reaches up to run her hands over his jaw as she brings his mouth down to hers, and he realizes she knows exactly what this is, and how long it's been coming.

"Nothing's changed, Emily," he whispers.

Against his skin, she smiles. "I know."

**10.14**

He only gets a day and a half with her, but it's a day and a half more than he had before.

They only leave her apartment once, for dinner at her favorite pub. In his arms, it's the first time she's heard Irish folk music in a decade without thinking of Doyle.

He can't stop thinking about her in Indianapolis. Somehow that translates into insight to Allan Archer, because he knows what it's like to try to live up to a past love.

Even if, for him, he's not the one who's a criminal.

And it won't destroy him.

**10.15**

Things are different from the last time. Real. Even when they'd been on the cusp of taking their relationship public, the years of secrecy had permeated everything to the point that they were still tentative behind closed doors.

It's too early to tell the team, but the hesitation is gone. They both know what it feels like apart, and neither one wants to go back.

He's been holding it back so long that when he tells her he loves her, it's freeing, and he says it every time they talk.

If anything happens, that's what he wants her to remember.

**10.16**

She's not expecting the visceral response when Garcia calls, even more breathless than usual, having a conniption because her Chocolate Thunder could have died.

Emily talks Garcia down enough that she won't suffocate Morgan when he lands, and then she calls Hotch and chews him out because it could have been him, and she had to hear it wasn't secondhand.

"Don't start something with me you don't intend to finish, Hotch."

"What makes you think I'd ever be finished with you?"

The timbre of his voice sends vibrations through her, sparking every nerve.

She'd forgotten she could feel this much.

**10.17**

"What do you know about a book called _Bare Reflections_?"

"Hey, I'm all for experimenting in the bedroom, but I'm not - "

"Emily." There's a warning tone to his voice, but she knows he's fighting back a smile. "I would really prefer _not_ to hear it from Garcia."

"Okay, okay."

When she's done priming him, he sighs. "And people actually find this erotic?"

"Some. Not me, personally."

"Good to know."

"Well…except for this thing in chapter four. That…I would be _very_ okay with."

Later, he sneaks a peek at chapter four.

He can't wear a tie for weeks after.

**10.18**

As if he didn't have contempt for politics and the Russian mob already, he finds himself in the middle of an absolute cluster, the director breathing down his neck, and frustrated in several ways.

This was supposed to be their weekend. Him, her, and Jack. Calling her, telling her not to come, he wants to scream.

Because it's_ her._

The weight of disappointment suffocates him for twenty-two hours straight, but the second he gets home, it all evaporates.

"I took an extra day." From the sofa, Jack grinning beside her, her eyes sparkle.

As if he didn't love her already.

**10.19**

"I heard a scandalous rumor about you."

He smiles. He's almost used that. "Oh yeah?"

"I heard that Super G-Man traded in his suit for short sleeves. JJ was in shock. I don't think she knew you had elbows."

There's a silence. Miles away, they can see each other smile.

"Lambert asked me if I travelled with Jack much."

"Aaron..."

"It's beautiful here. He'd love it." Then, softly - "You'd love it."

"Aaron."

"I don't want to have any more regrets."

"Neither do I."

His voice is rough. "I want to bring you here. Both of you."

"Then you will."

**10.20**

It's overwhelming, knowing what he's going through and that she's not there to hold him, run her fingers through his hair, remind him what an extraordinary man he is.

The thing is, he didn't have to tell her. He could've lied and said everything was fine, but he didn't, because they really are trying.

He's trying. She's not always sure she is. He's the one pushing, working for this, and she's afraid he thinks he's more invested than she is.

But he's not. Because he's been a constant undercurrent in everything she's done for eight years.

Him, and her fear.

**10.21**

He's petrified that she's just an illusion. That this is the final blow meant to tear his psyche to shreds.

Rossi warned her, though, and so she takes his hands and wordlessly places them on either side of her face, giving him tactile proof.

She holds him as he unravels, strokes his hair, allows him to collapse in exhaustion against her and keeps the terror at bay.

He wakes feeling fingers at his nape and sees her, kisses her to be sure. Her eyes flutter open as his mouth moves over her throat, and she tells him:

She's coming home.

**10.22**

Hotch is pretty sure that if Emily weren't back in London, he'd tell Cruz to shove his paperwork up his ass.

Even without her at home, he's not thrilled to find hours of work piled on his desk. He's not expecting what's sitting on top of the stack - an envelope bearing his name and an airmail stamp.

Inside he finds a business card bearing a familiar logo, the title below her name crossed out and replaced, in slanted script, with "Director, INTERPOL Washington."

He stares at it, mesmerized, imagining one more edit: his last name.

He can't help himself.

**10.23**

There's a fleeting moment as he watches Kate go when he considers asking Emily to come back. She's too good not to want on his team.

He knows, though, that they can't go back to that. And he's not sure he could handle it, after everything.

Doesn't want to.

But the last few weeks, Kate's speech in his office, it makes something else clear: he can't keep taking things for granted.

He doesn't plan it out. There's no ring or kneeling. It's not a question. He simply tells her what he realized five years ago.

He wants to marry her.


End file.
